I used to have a lot of hotdog stand websites... then built a big site that quickly  defeated all of them and most of their competitors.

Who is kicking all of the ass out there right now?. The hotdog stands? Or, the big sites like wikipedia, about, amazon, ebay, ??

If you are going to attack the US Navy which would you rather have?  One battleship or ten potato guns?

I used to run subdomains and then redirected them into folders on the main site and the results have been kickass.  Kickass.

There is always a question about how google is going to treat subdomains but there is never a question about how they are going to treat a big website.

As far as conversions go and impressing your visitors.  Which is going to do a better job.. A hotdog stand or a supermarket?  Which will produce better shopping cart totals though cross selling?

Your questions have been asked in this Q&A over and over again.  If you use search you will find lots of opinions that support the above?

Most people talk about blogs like they are the "Silver Bullets of SEO". However, their content is nearly worthless unless you can do one of two things: 1) write fantastic content that lots of other people want to link, like and tweet, or 2) content that is genuinely valuable to your visitors. If your content doesn't measure up then you will not get a good return on your time.

Autogenerated or inserted by hand makes no difference.

I get LOTS of traffic because I cover some events and some people search for them with a date.

To be certain that Google can read your dates or any other text information, view your page in google's cache.